Along with the recent investment, two new members have join Connora’s advisory board: Andre Genton, former president of Huntsman Advanced Materials, and Brendan Iribe, an entrepreneur known recently for the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook.
Connora’s Recyclamine technology is a green chemistry platform that provides a method of making and recycling composite waste materials and products. Efficiently recycling composite materials should have a positive impact in the automotive and aerospace industries, where the trend to make lighter, stronger, and more energy efficient vehicles is driving growth in the use of carbon fiber composite materials. In these and other applications, carbon fiber parts are often made in high volumes, with sometimes 20-40% of the raw materials going to waste. Since traditional thermoset plastics are not optimized for recyclability, current composite waste is intractable and often disposed of in landfill or by burning.
Lower costs
“Reclaiming the expensive carbon fiber [from manufacturing waste] in a near virgin state, and enabling OEMs to put it back into their products will help lower their costs over time,” said Dr Rey Banatao, Connora’s CEO.
Connora is currently in discussions with several auto and aerospace OEMs to develop a specific Recyclamine Epoxy Resin system for use in high-pressure resin transfer molding processes (HP-RTM), suitable to the high-volume manufacturing methods being adopted by auto and aerospace manufacturers today. Epoxy resins are currently the predominant thermoset plastic used in performance carbon fiber composites.
